Poet's Corner: Anne Bradstreet

An item from Today in Literature:

"On this day in 1672 Anne Bradstreet, the first published poet of the American colonies, died. Bradstreet enjoyed a relatively privileged life in England, but at the age of eighteen she, her husband, and her parents sailed with John Winthrop for the Puritan settlement at Massachusetts Bay. Her first book of poems, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, was published back in England in 1650 -- by her brother-in-law and apparently without her knowledge, Bradstreet expressing embarrassment that the world should see the 'ill-form'd offspring of my feeble brain.' These first poems are sometimes candid and immediate, but more often they are conventional in style and on accepted topics -- her love for husband, children, God, etc. Later poems can show a different attitude, one far from embarrassment:

I am obnoxious to each carping tongue,
Who sayes, my hand a needle better fits,
A Poets Pen, all scorne, I should thus wrong;
For such despighte they cast on female wits:
If what i doe prove well, it wo'nt advance,
They'l say its stolen, or else, it was by chance."